2015-04-15

As you may know, an Alberta election is underway. Will godless socialists form government and/or opposition? Will Jim Prentice be the PC leader who finally breaks that hallowed "PCs look in trouble at the time of the election call and then handily win a majority" streak? Will voters remember their distaste of Danielle Smith/Alison Redford/Raj Sherman in the ballot box?

The NDP plan would see 500 new beds open in each of those years to help get the approximately 500 Albertans taking up acute care beds out of hospital while they wait for long-term care.

“For the time being, given the fiscal challenges we find ourselves being faced with, this is what we think is a reasonable number to start with,” Notley said Tuesday during the announcement at the home of Bernie Travis, an Edmonton woman whose 64-year-old husband Clarence has been waiting since August in the University Hospital for a long-term care bed.

“The wait for long-term care is incredible. There aren’t any beds available,” said Travis, whose husband was diagnosed with dementia in 2011. “He’s taking up a bed that’s really needed for someone else.”

Clarence Travis has dementia. Dementia is not treatable, leaving the only option available pallative care. Unfortunately, in the messed up economics which is a government-run healthcare system, there is no incentive for Bernie Travis or the leftists who were hanging around her during this announcement to stop wasting money by having Clarence taking up this bed.

This may be a shock to some people, but if dementia doesn't require acute medical care, then even if the suggestion is pallative care the alternative to putting Travis in a regular hospital bed is his own bed. WebMD may not be very good as a resource to self-diagnose medical issues, but they offer home care resources for treating dementia. That would be at Travis' home, not a hospital, automatically freeing up a hospital bed. The "rationale" for keeping Travis in a hospital bed just because no hospice beds are available is twofold:1) hospital beds keep greedy unionized healthcare staff busy and in higher demand2) healthcare is "free" so the medical equivalent of push-button starts gets graduated into "absolute fundamental right"

The structural problems with government healthcare isn't, of course, something Rachel Notley and the NDP even have a rudimentary knowledge of. In their world, your body belongs to Rachel Notley and she'll pander for your votes until she's pink in the face putting a warm fuzzy on the totalitarian way she would operate a healthcare system. She puts you in a nice bed after a lifetime of treating you like an ATM machine, and expects you to be happy for it.

Unfortunately, the financial implications of the Notley scheme is something they possibly have even less knowledge of.

Notley said she will unveil her party’s full fiscal platform within the week, which will outline how the NDP plans to find the $40 million to fund the new beds each year. She said the pledge is “fully costed” and will include a progressive income tax system and more revenue from “corporate Alberta.”

I'm sure we'll be covering more of how Notley plans to raise taxes and chase jobs and wealth out of the province, but for now let's instead look at the demand side of her equation.

According to the "fully costed" NDP plan, Premier Notley (*spit*) would spend $40 million annually on this plan to build 500 new beds annually, putting an annual per-bed cost of $80,000. Compare this to the October announcement that the Prentice PCs would be building 464 continuing care beds over the next year. These beds are cheaper than the beds at the Rachel Notley Home for Mentally Deficient NDP Voters, only $33.4 million in "total costs" ($71,982/bed/year). As usually happens with these announcements, though, the apples-to-oranges comparisons make any direct link almost futile.

Jim Prentice was actually in government and had to actually spend the money, so his figures had to be grounded in reality. They get "costed" every March. Rachel Notley just needs the spreadsheet to balance out in theory, while reality gets aborted in a private Morgentaller clinic.

Prentice's plan includes the annual cost to administer these beds. The Notley plan seems to only deal with the construction of the beds themselves (Prentice only was fast-tracking 300 beds already under construction, with the balance coming from existing facility space). In other words, it looks like the total cost for every Notley bed is double what she claims it is (we can charitably go with $80,000 + $71,982 = $151,982 = 89% cost overrun, which is about right for the NDP).

The Prentice announcement was not for the same type of bed as the Notley bed either. Notley's plan calls for "long-term beds", which is a champagne version of what Prentice was offering in October. So says "Wildrose critic Kerry Towle" (who joined Jim Prentice as a PC government member two months later):

“They need long-term care nursing beds. Putting people … into continuing care beds — which is a lower level of care — will only force them back into hospital.”

One presumes therefore that the long-term care beds Notley is proposing -- unless she's being deceptive about the level of service the beds are providing -- will cost more than $71,982 a year to run. Significantly more, since only 67/464 Prentice beds were "LTC beds" and Notley is claiming 500 LTC beds.

Prentice could be deceiving us about the costs of running his beds, I suppose, but there's no benefit in that. If he could announce more beds for the same price, he'd be doing that in October. Again, Prentice's numbers may be wrong but we have far more reason to trust his figures then we do to trust Rachel Notley's.

She's a liberal and she's a liar. So I'm going to tell you she's lying.